New season, new challenges

Portmagee, Ireland. One of the possible landing spots for UBC SailBot in 2015. Photo by Tobias Abel.

Welcome to a new season of UBC SailBot news!

The team has worked throughout the summer and beginning of the fall to plan for our newest adventure: crossing the Atlantic Ocean with an autonomous sailing vessel! We are planning to enter the MicroTransat challenge (http://www.microtransat.org/), a 2,900 km (1,800 miles) journey from Newfoundland to the West coast of Ireland in 2015.

6 teams have so far tried this challenge, including the French Naval Academy, but nobody has succeeded so far. This is going to be our most challenging project yet, and we hope to be the first team to succeed when we launch our attempt in 2015. To complete this challenge we will use all the knowledge we have about robotic sailing vessels and apply the same winning 4-step recipe that lead us to winning the International Robotic Sailing Regatta in 2012 and 2013:

1. Design for the challenge using the best brains of UBC and our fantastic industry mentors.

2. Build the best vessel we can with expertize from the local marine industry.

3. Test the hell out of it!

4. Race!

Throughout our two-year project we are dedicated to showing you all the steps we are taking in this exciting new project from UBC SailBot. Stay tuned!